News

Arts shines a little more this week with the announcement of two special awards for members of our Faculty. Among four UWaterloo faculty members recognized with a 2018 Distinguished Teacher Award is Shannon Dea of the Department of Philosophy. And among three student-teachers to receive the award for exceptional student teaching is Quinlan Lee, a senior undergraduate in Economics.

Three original performances will be staged this week in (and around) Theatre of the Arts. UpStart is a biannual one-act play festival, featuring new works written, directed, designed, and performed by students under the mentorship of faculty and staff from the Theatre and Performance program (Department of Drama & Speech Communication).

In the wake of recent acquittals in the murders of Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine and the ensuing national discussions, a diverse group of faculty members in Arts and at the the university-colleges are opening their classrooms or hosting teach-ins and conversations during the week of March 5.

The Faculty of Arts held our annual Three Minute Thesis heat late last week with 14 truly outstanding competitors. "The quality of this year's presentations has just blown me away!" tweeted Angela Rooke of the Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs office, who was among the enthusiastic audience filling the room to over-capacity.

The Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA) announced the release of Cracks in the Liberal International Order: 2018 Global Trends Report – a Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) Graduate Fellows anthology. The anthology is a compilation of policy briefs prepared by the BSIA masters and doctoral students for officials at Global Affairs Canada (GAC).

In 1992, on the 30^th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, historians Jim Blight and Janet Lang organized a remarkable meeting in Havana between Fidel Castro, Robert McNamara, and former aides of Nikita Khrushchev.

Three people with strong links to the University of Waterloo were among the newest appointees to the Order of Canada, including Douglas Stenton, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette, Governor General of Canada, announced the 125 appointees on December 29.

In his new book Academic Ableism Professor Jay Dolmage (English Language and Literature) notes the progress higher education has made to be more inclusive of people with disabilities. But the book also offers critique after critique of the way colleges [and universities] have ignored or responded inadequately to the needs of many students and professors. Here is an excerpt of a recent Inside Higher Ed interview with Prof. Dolmage.

The Critical Media Lab plays an interesting part in the Grand Philharmonic Choir’s upcoming performance of Handel’s “Messiah” by assisting in the creation of digital projections of an illuminated copy of the St. John’s Bible. Read the story of how old and new media came together, originally published in the Daily Bulletin.

Just a few days ago the Council of Ontario Universities (COU) announced that Vinh Nguyen, professor of Diaspora Literatures at Renison University College and of English in the Faculty of Arts, has won the 2017 Polanyi Prize in Literature. This is the second Polanyi Prize awarded to a professor in Arts, following Chris Eliasmith's (Philosophy, Systems Design Engineering, Computer Science) NSERC Polanyi Prize two years ago.